Whether we regard the New Zealand Company as a high-souled organisation or as an "unprincipled, rapacious body, utterly regardless of the rights and welfare of the natives" (Lord Stanley's description), we cannot but admire its business-like energy and the persistency with which it poured British citizens into New Zealand. Admittedly a business concern, formed for the purpose of utilising capital in colonisation, it did not hide the commercial side of its character, and, viewing the matter after the cooling lapse of eighty-six years, an impartial critic would admit that it was no wonder the company was viewed with some suspicion by the Home Government.

While the company's end was ignominious, the good old John Bull tenacity which characterised its founders won out in the end, and success crowned what the directors in 1839 called "the bold enterprise of planting another scion of the Anglo-Saxon race and of Great Britain in a remote island of the Southern Hemisphere." That the company's methods were questionable is fairly plain, for as a matter of cold hard fact it sold in London 100,000 acres of land before it possessed a title to a single foot. As Rusden put it, "those people who paid money drew lots for unknown sections in land which the company was about to seek."

In considering the story of the settlement of Nelson we see where this loose method of dealing landed the colonists—for the Wairau tragedy was directly traceable to it.

With an energy that is nothing short of astonishing the New Zealand Company had no sooner landed several shiploads of people on the shore of Port Nicholson than it looked round for a spot upon which to plant another settlement. In naming their settlements these company officials were nothing if not British, and having honoured the hero of Waterloo in their first, they naturally thought of the hero of Trafalgar when it came to naming their second child. In and around Nelson you will find many street and place names which perpetuate the memory of incidents in the life of the great sailor.

Oddly enough, Nelson was "all dressed up with nowhere to go" long before its site was selected. Colonel Wakefield, brother of the company's founder, was chief agent of the company at Wellington, and he was anxious that the second settlement should be located on the plains at the back of Bank's Peninsula. Captain Hobson, the Governor, having fixed upon Auckland as the capital of the Colony, wanted the Nelson colonists sent up North, and he page 57 strongly urged that the settlement should be placed on the shores of the Hauraki Gulf—Mahurangi for preference, where he offered a site of 50,000 acres with a promise to negotiate for an additional 150,000 acres. It was a case of pull devil, pull baker, and neither would give way, but in the end Wakefield seems to have made a sort of a compromise and decided upon the shores of Cook Straits.